Make Money On-line with your Jewlry Website




	Do You Make Money with your Jewelry or Craft Website? By Lisa Jay Lantana Designwear I wish that I had a dime for every time that I was asked, "Do you make money with your website?". I could take my husband out for a nice big steak dinner. It is a great question, don't get me wrong. But the truth is that I honestly did not intend to make money online for the first year or two with our website. I knew that it would take a lot of time and work to get our website popular enough to earn the trust of the consumers that would be buying our jewelry. During that time, there is a lot of hard work to be done. You can't just sit back once you have built your website. Now the real work begins. 1. Optimize your website for the search engines. This is probably THE most important step for your website. When a prospective customer searches the internet for your product, you want your website to be listed in the first three pages of their search, otherwise you will never be found. There are 2,500,000 websites that sell handmade jewelry. I had to find a way to get our site listed above all of them. I didn't even bother trying to compete for the keyword "handmade jewelry" since there were so many other sites. Two of my favorite places that tell step by step how to optimize your website to make money online are Selfpromotion and a program called "Make Your Site Sell" that sells for around $30 (the link for MYSS is at the bottom left of their page). Both are full of information on building a successful website. You really can't beat the price! 2. Submit to the search engines, and then wait. It usually takes 3-6 weeks to get listed in the search engines. Selfpromotion can help you do this for a small donation of $10 a year. You can do it for free, but I felt that the ease of using their site was well worth the $10. If you want to make money online you have to use Selfpromotion ! You will definitely get your money back. 3. Get traffic to your website! This is so important. I am told that once you have 200 visitors (not hits) a day to your website, you can start to expect to make money online. This has to do with many factors though, such as the quality of your site, shopping cart available, good products....... The list goes on, but you get the idea. Is all traffic created equally? No! Let me tell you why--- When I first built my website, I was so proud of it that I wanted everyone to visit. I would tell all of my jewelry designer friends about it, and they would visit. I had over 100 visits a day, yet no sales. Of course not! The only people visiting my site were other jewelry designers that were not interested in purchasing from me. I had to change my tactic to get "buying customers" to my site. So how do you get traffic to your site?: Articles -- Write articles of interest for your target audience. If you build bird houses, you may want to put articles about birds on your website. If you sell baby booties, write about things that interest mothers. Submit those articles!-- Don't just write your articles and then sit on them. Send them out to all of the directories that you can find. I know that a lot of people spend HOURS upon HOURS submitting their articles. I found a better way. It is called Ezineannouncer. "At Last! ... Now there's a faster and easier way to get instant exposure for your ezine newsletter and ezine articles -- all with a few clicks of your mouse." - Jason Potash EzineAnnouncer Newsletters -- Send out a newsletter to those that sign up for it. This reminds your possible customers about your website. I found that people were visiting our website once or twice, then forgetting about us. Now, they are reminded about us a few times a month with relevant articles and news of ongoing sales. This has doubled our sales! It took us months to find the perfect e-mail marketing company. We chose Intellicontact because they beat everyone else's price and offered so much more. Don't forget to submit your newsletter to all of the e-zine directories. (You can do this with the Ezineannouncer as well.) E-mail signature -- Put a signature at the bottom of all of your e-mails. Be sure that you know what you want to accomplish with your signature. We want people to sign up for our newsletter, and to visit our website. If you want them to take advantage of a sale, tell them about that. I suggest that you change your signature often. This is ours: ************************************** Please be sure to visit our website at www.lantanadesignwear.com ************************************ Sign up for our newsletter at www.lantanadesignwear.com/newsletter.htm ************************************* FREE REPORT for all new newsletter subscribers 4. Print Advertisements -- Don't forget to hand out business cards and flyers with your website listed on them. I give my cards out like candy. I just ask, "Can I leave you my card?" We trusted Plum River Marketing for our print needs. I think they did a fantastic job on our logo, and got it right the first time. Now, take a deep breath, and get busy!! You CAN make money online, but it is not going to be easy. Another great resource:** 9 Ways to Make Money Online with your Jewelry and Craft Website This should give you some more ideas about ways to make some money with your on-line store.